them were content to paint pleasant little pools, clumps of trees and rocks and the barnyards and haystacks of the neighbouring farms. At the first few of them attempted to paint the bold cliffs near the top of which they dwelt, and those that did were not satisfied with their work. When one of them would bring in a sketch of Clinton Point or Indian Head the others would smile and say:

"Oh, he's getting ambitious-he's painting the Palisades."

Among the first really noteworthy pieces of work done by one of their number were some studies of the cliffs by Perrine and Lie. Lie loved the windbent trees leaning out over the rocky heights and made some fine sketches of them. There is a Doré-like poetry and

work there as altogether successful it afforded me a good start. The foliage, especially in autumn, is wonderful and the high rocky cliffs are full of poetry. As for the colony itself, I spent some of the best days of my life there among thoroughly congenial fellow-workers. I owe a great deal to Ridgefield." And it is true that this Barbizon of the Palisades was a place of true fraternal and helpful comradeship. The woods rang with joyful bursts of song when the artists gathered together of an evening. with the stein on the table.

Mr. Groll's "Pool on the Palisades," also called "Harmony in Gold," painted at that time, still stands in the better class of the work of an artist who has won four medals in as many exhibitions,

mystery in some of these studies of Lie's, and particularly that called "Autumn Winds," in which two dark oaks lean in despair away from the blast, while overhead is a rushing sky in which great cloud-puffs are massed in an effective manner. In this work is seen that breadth of treatment to be noted in the Norwegian sketches by the same artist and in his "Brooklyn Bridge," hung in the spring exhibition of the Academy of Design.

It was at the end of his student days in Munich that Alfred Groll, returning to America, went directly to the Palisades, regarding that region as the best convenient field for his work.

"I wanted to be in the wilds," he says, "and so I settled down in that beautiful place. I worked hard there for three years, as a member of the Ridgefiel colony, and though I don't regard my

among them the Innes gold medal awarded this spring for his "Lake Louise" at the Academy of Design. To see this latter picture the Duchess and Princess of Connaught visited Groll's studio while they were in New York last January-the only studio thus honoured during their stay in America.

Between Groll and Perrine there came to be a close comradeship. Both had come to feel the poetry of the Palisades as probably no other artists have felt it, and this formed a strong bond of union between the two men, both then at the beginning of their careers. Perrine, who when he had landed at the Mallory Line dock in New York a few years before with one dollar and forty cents and a big six-shooter in his pocket and had pawned the pistol for a decent suit of clothes after having been buncoed out of his Texas suit by a fellow-traveller, was still a poor

CHARACTERISTIC CLIFF SCENE BY PERRINE. THIS PICTURE HANGS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

man, but he had sworn an oath "to paint or starve," and it was this grim vow that won him such a high place in Groll's respect. Where Perrine went Groll went, too. They walked in the woods, they boated and camped together.

He

Groll left Ridgefield after three years of work there and went to Arizona. is now in New York, but is planning to build a studio on the Palisades; for once the artist feels the witchery of that region he will not care to stay long away. Perrine remained upon the cliffs, to live with them and to study as no other man has studied them, in all their moods, the stormiest and wildest of these being meat and drink to him. For the savage which lurks in the breast of every man is strongly marked in the nature of this most representative painter of the Palisades. He lives a lonely life in a little chalet half-way down the steep and rugged old ferry road that runs from Englewood Cliffs to the river margin opposite Spuyten Duyvil. There are two large rooms in the house-one on the first floor and the other on the slope-ceiled upper story. In the wide-windowed upper room Perrine works. It was here

that he painted that striking Palisades Cliff scene which hangs in the White House, the notable rock piece "Getting Firewood" owned by the New Gallery together with many other pictures among them "The Robbers," owned by the Carnegie Institute. It was here tha the late Richard Watson Gilder and other writers have come to visit him and hear him talk in his ecstatic way about the Palisades.

When the cold winds have stripped bare the trees and the faces of the crag: peer out in the thin winter sunlight, that is when Perrine does most of his work. He loves to paint the black clouds that lower above the cliffs, and nothing suits him better than a great storm, when the pines and cedars are bending like tortured wraiths before the wind. With Perrine, as with all true artists, painting is worship. He speaks with the reverence of the ascetic of the wonderful work of Nature in and about his airy demesne.

"The Palisades have a character al their own," he said to me in his studio "It is a character that must be studied It is far too subtle to be grasped by the idle visitor. Their beauty must be lived with before one may respond to their deepest spell. And then what a play

ground they become for the imagination. and with what solemn fitness they frame the stars! One may sit here at night and watch the city lights come out on the eastern shore, a long thread of gems. But a leaf held at arm's length would blot from the eye a point where exists a greater human activity than anywhere else upon our planet to-day.

"They told me I should never be able to paint the Palisades-that because of their sheer rise and the narrow shore margin at their base they could not be correctly represented upon an ordinary canvas. Well, they did puzzle me at first, but I began to work out a theory of projection of my own and then the work was easier."

In his lonely studio are to be seen some striking sunset studies in pastel. They are five-minute sketches which, when placed side by side, make up a colour sequence that is truly remarkable. They represent the western sky over the Hackensack hills from a half-hour before sunset to a halfhour after, and they run the whole gamut of colour tones from opalescent yellows and greens to deep purples and browns.

LIE OUT SKETCHING

He asked me to come outside and see the rocks. Leaning against a frost-scarred scarp, he pointed to the delicate greens, the bronze yellows, the rich browns and the dull blues of the igneous basalt.

"If you live here long and study closely," said he, with his characteristic seriousness, "you come to feel that the smallest of these rocks, the humblest violet, the single dewdrop, the tinest grain of sand by the river down there are as wonderful as the highest cliff, which is no truer symbol than they are of the great Universal Power which makes and shapes tree, river, rock and whole planetary systems."

It is with this reverent appreciation of Nature that Perrine works, and the same feeling has dominated Lie, Groll and other representative painters of the Palisades. Among these others, though he has not yet exhibited, is young Jaimé Carret, whose studio is at Coytesville and in whose work there is a breadth and

mystery comparable in a sense with that seen in Perrine's and Lie's. All the Palisades artists will tell you that Carret is the coming man, and certainly his studies of the forests and rocks of that region are of a kind to lure the imagination.

Ernest Roth, who lives at Fort Lee, has made some fine studies of scenes in that neighbourhood. Mr. Roth, however, is best known by his Venetian an Florentine etchings. He spends much of his time sketching in Italy. Another Fort Lee artist of whom the Palisades painters speak highly is Walt Kuhn, whose work is certainly deserving of mention here, and if the writer forgot Samuel Weiss the list of promising landscape men would not be complete.

Among those still remaining at Ridgefield are Robert Sprunk, represented in

this year's Academy, Nie Andress, the sculptor, whose bust of the Madonna and Child was bought by the Kaiser, Stephe Van Schaick, the portrait painter an illustrator, and R. A. Carter, whose landscapes evidence skilful handling. In fact Mr. Carter is deserving of more tha passing mention. He has caught the spirit of the high Palisades though in 1 different way from Perrine. He loves the luminous and the obvious, and has a eye for high colour. During winter walks in the woods the writer has found him sitting patiently on his stool in the snow sketching some old pile of rocks, with cold fingers, but as he says, not with co feet. Truly a painstaking and deserving member of the airy Barbizon of the Palisades.

At Leonia, a few miles above Ridge